The King of Dauphin Island

Michael Knight

Winter 2017

Marcus Weems was the sixth-richest man in the state of Alabama, but he lost his wife to cancer like everybody else. Of course he brought the full leverage of his affluence to bear on her condition—Sloan Kettering, Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson, names of hospitals like the board of directors for some conglomerate of suffering—but the diagnosis had come too late, all the treatments and the clinical trials for naught, and Suzette Weems died at home with her family at her bedside, the day’s last light outside her windows reflected on Mobile Bay.

In addition to her devoted husband, Suzette Weems was survived by two daughters: Meredith, twenty-nine, wife of Harris Stokes, mother of infant James and Chairperson of the Mobile County Chapter of the American Red Cross; and Emily, twenty-one, Dean’s list student in Economics and treasurer of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Alabama. They were capable and well-adjusted girls, achingly dear to Marcus. After the funeral, Emily requested incompletes in her fall classes and resumed permanent occupancy of her room, perfuming the house with the lavender and praline bouquet of her shampoo. At least three nights a week, with infant James in tow, Meredith abandoned her husband to sleep over as well, regularly enough that she stocked the empty bureau of her youth with diapers and onesies and nursing bras. Marcus thought he understood. They believed that their presence would provide a bulwark against his loss. They loved him, and he loved them back and he was willing to humor them for a while.

When we say a poem aloud, we recreate it with our bodies; it becomes part of us. And our bodies are sustained, both physically and otherwise, by living systems and landscapes. That many of those living systems are under deep threat—from climate crisis, development, overuse and underappreciation—makes it all the more important to let place into creative work, to acknowledge both a source and a debt.